30 September 2025, 13:30 CET
Seminar Room 1.103
Olga Shemyakina
Georgia Institute of Technology
Students’ exposure to armed conflict has been increasing globally. This study examines students’ performance under extended stress imposed by armed conflict using test scores from the 2013-2018 high-stakes exam in Afghanistan. Exploiting variation in the intensity of violent conflict between districts and the timing of exams by provinces-year, we find that an increase in conflict-related fatalities in the student locality before the test is associated with lower test scores and a reduced probability of admission to post-secondary education, with women being disproportionately affected. The impact of conflict varies based on the timing of exposure to violent events, with more recent events having a stronger negative impact. We show deteriorating household economic conditions and reduced educational spending are the channels through which conflict may impact test takers’ performance.
Albena Sotirova
VU Amsterdam
We test the impact of an edutainment intervention aiming to reduce child marriage that is targeted at men, at women, or men and women jointly, on education outcomes of adolescent girls. Our analysis is based on a cluster-randomized controlled trial in 177 rural villages in Pakistan, which randomized whether men, women or both genders in the household received the intervention. Survey data were collected from adolescent girls (aged 14-17) and their male and female caregivers. We do not find a significant impact on school enrollment or grade attainment at midline, six months after the intervention. However, at endline, eighteen months after the intervention, current school enrollment has increased with 10%-13%. Impact estimates do not significantly differ between treatment arms compared to the control group. In addition, grade attainment at endline is significantly higher when only men have been treated, increasing with 0.95 to 1.06 years, for the full sample and ever enrolled girls, respectively. The impact estimates for grade attainment when targeting women only or men and women jointly is smaller and statistically insignificant, although we cannot rule out that they are different to the male estimates. As a next step, we will analyze the underlying mechanisms, investigating the impact of the intervention on individual preferences, attitudes, expectations and beliefs regarding girls’ education, as well as spillovers on school outcomes of the adolescents’ younger siblings.
Alaka Halder
Garner Health
This paper examines how the international migration of household members impacts the education and weekly hours worked by children living in rural Bangladesh. International migrants play an important role in Bangladesh’s development, with remittances contributing to 6% of GDP. Despite over 2 million children left behind in migrant households, there is a lack of comprehensive research on their human capital formation. This first comprehensive study of children in Bangladeshi migrant and non-migrant households analyzes data from nationally representative surveys and addresses potential endogeneity by using historic migration rates as an instrument for a household’s migrant status. Boys aged 15-17 from migrant households are less likely to be enrolled in school and work 12.7 more hours per week on average than boys in non-migrant households. Girls of all ages in migrant households, including the 15-17 age group, work slightly fewer hours per week than girls in non-migrant households but their school enrollment is not impacted. There is also no impact on the years of education attained for either sex. These results suggest that rural boys living in migrant households are less likely to complete secondary school, which may limit their long-run human capital formation and socioeconomicmobility.